Free Job Description Decoder

Why Job Adverts Need Decoding At All

Very few job adverts are written by the person you would report to. Most are assembled — a duties list inherited from the last time the role was open, a requirements block copied from a similar posting, and a paragraph of employer-brand language added at the top. The result is a document where the genuinely load-bearing sentences sit next to filler, in the same font, with the same bullet.

That matters for two practical reasons. Candidates routinely rule themselves out over wish-list items that were never gates, and candidates routinely apply with a resume written in vocabulary the advert never uses, which costs them in keyword-matched screening. Both are fixable in ten minutes once you can see which sentence is which.

What each part of the report means

• What the role actually involves — duty lines with the stock phrases removed, plus a count of how much of the advert was boilerplate. A high boilerplate count is not a criticism of the employer; it usually just means the ad was written from a template, and it tells you how much of the text carried no information.
• Hard requirements versus wish-list — every requirement line, sorted, with the reason it was sorted that way. Lines marked unclear are ones with no heading and no strength wording; treat those as questions for the recruiter rather than as gates.
• Wording to mirror — ranked terms, weighted towards the requirements block. These are the words that a keyword-matched screen is most likely to be looking for. Mirroring them is legitimate tailoring; claiming things you have not done is not.
• Seniority and title fit — compares the seniority word in the title against ownership language in the body. A mismatch in either direction is worth knowing before you discuss salary.
• Signals worth asking about — see the section below, which explains exactly how conservative this is.

How the flagging works, and what it deliberately does not do

Wrongly telling someone that a decent employer looks exploitative is a real harm, so the detection here is built to under-report rather than over-report:

• Combinations, not keywords. An on-call rotation is normal in operations, engineering, healthcare and facilities work and is never flagged on its own — only intensity wording attached to it, such as around-the-clock availability with no mention of compensation, is raised. "Fast-paced" alone is never flagged either; what is reported is density, with the count shown, so you can judge the evidence.
• Arithmetic where arithmetic is possible. An advert asking for more years of a technology than the technology has existed is the one finding stated as a fact, because it is one. It usually means the requirements were assembled from a template, which is useful to know before you disqualify yourself from the rest of the list.
• Every finding shows its evidence. You get the exact sentence it fired on, why that pattern is a signal, and a question to ask. You are meant to be able to overrule it.
• Marginal is labelled marginal. Family-culture language and hero words like "rockstar" are reported as marginal, because they are. They say something about writing style, and reasonable people weigh them very differently.
• No verdict on the employer. Nothing here scores a company. It reads an advert.

Some things worth knowing sit outside what any text tool can see. Employment protections and what an employer may lawfully ask differ by country and state — in the US, the EEOC's summary of prohibited employment policies and practices is the primary source; in the UK, the National Careers Service guidance on job applications covers the application process itself. For US federal roles, the requirements are stricter and published in the official USAJOBS resume guidance.

What happens to the text you paste

The analysis runs on our server, in the request that submits your text. We say that plainly because it is what the code does — several tools in this suite score entirely in your browser, and this one does not. Your text is not written to a database, no copy of it is kept after the response is sent, no file you upload is stored, and there is no account for anything to be attached to. If a job ad or resume contains details you would rather not send anywhere, remove them before pasting; the analysis does not need your name, address or phone number to work.

Turning the report into an application

The fastest sequence is: decode the ad, take the core keywords into the free ATS checker with your current resume, fix what it flags, then write the cover letter against the hard requirements rather than the wish-list. If your resume needs rebuilding rather than editing, the free resume builder defaults to single-column, parser-safe layouts, and Purdue OWL's resume writing guide is a good neutral reference on structure.